Marvel Zombies
With the recent announcement of Marvel Studio’s decision to go all woke all the time, a great many pundits are darkly heralding the imminent demise of the Devil Mouse. The common consensus on Team Western Civilization holds that the “get woke/go broke” maxim will soon lay low the house that Walt built. Allow me to voice a note of dissent.
The world loves empty spectacle. All the flat characters, meaningless drama, empty action, and bland dialogue in the world won’t bring down a film filled with lots and lots of splodey-splodey. Aquaman was a DC movie with all that implies and even following on the heels weak sisters like Batman vs. Superman and Justice League it nearly cracked the billion dollar mark. Disney’s ‘live action’ remake of The Lion King looks like cold mud on a hot roof, and people still forked over half a billion dollars worth of tickets in the opening weekend.
Or take the Transformers franchise. It’s worst performer, Last Knight, still managed to triple its budget and earn Bumblebee a shot at the screen. And that’s more than a decade after we all realized that the franchise was all chrome, no engine.
For all the tepid praise heaped on Marvel’s Endgame duology, it delivered exactly what the film-going audience wanted to see – sound and fury. A whole lot of noise just crammed in between credit sequences is Marvel’s strong suit, and all of these titles will play right into that. They can keep blasting out movies like this for at least a decade after the last clear hit – and they will.
No, Marvel isn’t going anywhere anytime soon. Like all of our major IP franchises, Hollywood will ride that horse right into the ground. You can count on Marvel trubdling along X-Men style right on into a Phase Five, sucking up all that sweet foreign lucre and blaming all their failures on Chads who don’t embrace their anti-Christian Trojan Horse messaging.